In this paper, we extend the state-space methodology proposed by Blagrave et al. (2015) and decompose Canadian potential output into trend labour productivity and trend labour input. As in Blagrave et al. (2015), we include output growth and inflation expectations from consensus forecasts to help refine our estimates.
Every quarter, the Bank of Canada conducts quarterly consultations with businesses across Canada, referred to as the Business Outlook Survey (BOS). A principal-component analysis conducted by Pichette and Rennison (2011) led to the development of the BOS indicator, which summarizes survey results and is used by the Bank as a gauge of overall business sentiment.
In this paper, we assess several methods that have been used to measure the Canadian trend unemployment rate (TUR). We also consider improvements and extensions to some existing methods.
We use a new real-time database for Canada to study various output gap measures. This includes recently developed measures based on models incorporating many variables as inputs (and therefore requiring real-time data for many variables).
